CHAPTER XXII.

THE STATE OF THE DEAD.

Among all the problems with which man has busied himself,
none so appeals to his hopes and fears as that of
the future life. Is there a farther shore, and
if so, shall we reach it? Few races, if any, have
doubted the existence of a future state, but their
conceptions of it have differed greatly. But
of all the races of antiquity, outside Egypt, the
Celts seem to have cherished the most ardent belief
in the world beyond the grave, and to have been preoccupied
with its joys. Their belief, so far as we know
it, was extremely vivid, and its chief characteristic
was life in the body after death, in another region.[1154]
This, coupled with the fact that it was taught as a
doctrine by the Druids, made it the admiration of classical
onlookers. But besides this belief there was
another, derived from the ideas of a distant past,
that the dead lived on in the grave—­the
two conceptions being connected. And there may
also have been a certain degree of belief in transmigration.
Although the Celts believed that the soul could exist
apart from the body, there seems to be no evidence
that they believed in a future existence of the soul
as a shade. This belief is certainly found in
some late Welsh poems, where the ghosts are described
as wandering in the Caledonian forest, but these can
hardly be made use of as evidence for the old pagan
doctrine. The evidence for the latter may be
gathered from classical observers, from archaeology
and from Irish texts.

Caesar writes: “The Druids in particular
wish to impress this on them that souls do not perish,
but pass from one to another (ab aliis ... ad alios)
after death, and by this chiefly they think to incite
men to valour, the fear of death being overlooked.”
Later he adds, that at funerals all things which had
been dear to the dead man, even living creatures,
were thrown on the funeral pyre, and shortly before
his time slaves and beloved clients were also consumed.[1155]
Diodorus says: “Among them the doctrine
of Pythagoras prevailed that the souls of men were
immortal, and after completing their term of existence
they live again, the soul passing into another body.
Hence at the burial of the dead some threw letters
addressed to dead relatives on the funeral pile, believing
that the dead would read them in the next world."[1156]
Valerius Maximus writes: “They would fain